March 28, 2014 - Child Care Provider Letter

Child Care Provider Letter dated March 28, 2014

March 28, 2014

Dear Child Care Provider:

This notice concerns payments made to you for the Child Care Assistance Program. Due to programming errors, the Department of Human Services incorrectly deducted union dues amounts as well as parent co-payment amounts resulting in either an over- or under-payment to some providers for some cases. These incorrect payment amounts were caused by the IDHS payment system. SEIU was not responsible for these payment errors in any way. IDHS has worked very hard to ensure that these errors have been corrected and will not re-occur.

IDHS will be taking the following steps to adjust for the incorrect payments:

If IDHS has deducted too much money from your payment due to an incorrect co-payment deduction, you will receive a single payment to reimburse you for the money that was erroneously deducted from your payment. This adjustment will be added to the first payment processed to you after April 18. If IDHS under-deducted the copayment, you are not being asked to pay that money back to IDHS and no deductions will be made from future payments to recover those funds.

If IDHS has deducted too much money from your payment for your SEIU Fair Share or Member's Dues, the union deduction on your future payments will be reduced to $0.01until you have received all of the over-deducted funds. For example, if you normally pay $20 in union dues and IDHS deducted $50, you will receive $30 back. Your next payment will reflect only a $0.01 deduction for union dues. The payment after that will show a $9.98 due deduction, thereby offsetting the over-deduction. After the over-deduction has been reimbursed in this manner, future deductions will reflect the amount you normally pay for union dues.

If IDHS deducted too little from your check for union dues, an additional amount will be withheld from your future payments until all the dues you should have paid have been collected. The maximum amount of deduction will be an additional 50% of the union dues that is normally deducted from your payment.

For example, if you normally have approximately $40 per month deducted for union dues but only $15 was deducted from your last 2 payments, you owe $50 in back dues. IDHS will deduct an extra 50% of your dues per payment until the $50 is paid back. Your next 2 payments would have approximately $60 taken out for union dues ($40 normal dues deduction + $20 towards paying back the dues still owed). Your payments after that would then have a union dues deduction of $50 ($40 normal dues deduction + $10 to complete pay-back). All payments after that would have only your normal union dues deducted.

We apologize for the hardship that this has caused our home providers. We are confident that the programming issue that caused these errors has been fixed so that these errors do not reoccur. We also continue to make improvements to our new Child Care systems to ensure CCAP continues to provide needed services to the low-income working families in Illinois.